Arrival

I landed in Baghdad today at about 5 p.m. local time (that's 9 a.m. for you East Coasters). The landing, which I have told many of you about, was a bit harrowing. To avoid anti-aircraft fire, the pilot guides the plane in a very tight spiral for the final 8,000 feet. It made me somewhat dizzy, but lunch stayed in my stomach (which you may know is an impressive accomplishment for me!). After I got off the plan, a taxi driver met me at the airport. He took me a few miles out to a parking lot behind a military checkpoint, where I got in an armored vehicle being trailed by a regular vehicle. We got to our residence around 7 p.m., where I met more people than my sleepy brain can remember names of. Since then, I've been hanging out, chatting with our female translator and a driver who decided my name was "veeeeeeery pretty!" I have my own bedroom, which is twice the size of mine in D.C. and is well air-conditioned, so life is good.

I feel like I haven't seen enough of Iraq to describe yet, but I have a few initial impressions. The first is that there are so many guns here. Police and military officials obviously use weapons, but there were also several ordinary citizens wandering around with AKs. Concealed, revealed, it doesn't really matter.

I was told to avoid eye contact with people, especially men, as we drove to the residence, out of modesty. A "good Iraqi woman" would not look a man directly in the eye. It's a difficult thing to avoid, especially when the sight of people riding in the back of pickup trucks is common, since they're at eye level. The result is a weird form of reverse tunnel vision--you can see everything except what's in front of your nose. I don't like being a good Iraqi woman.

Okay, that's enough rambling for the moment--it's 1 a.m. and I think I'll go to bed. Future posts will be a bit more thematic and less train-of-thought, I promise.

A brief respite

Just a quick update, since I'm completely wiped and am about to fall into my plush Four Seasons bed. I'm now on a later flight to Baghdad tomorrow, which is the best news I've heard in days. My original flight was at 9, which would require leaving the hotel at 6:30--not welcome news for someone who's been traveling for 36 hours. I definitely need a full night's sleep tonight, and now I'll get it. My plane leaves Amman at 2 and gets into Baghdad at 4:30. It'll take a couple of hours to get through customs and get to our house, but I promise to post something here as soon as I'm back--should be around 7 or so (11 a.m. EDT).

Itinerary

Several people have asked, so here's a copy of my itinerary for the next two days. I won't have internet access in Frankfurt, but I will post again from Amman and then Baghdad.

Much love!

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From:
WASHINGTON DULLES, DC (IAD)
Departs:
5:18pm Tue, Jul 10
To:
FRANKFURT, GERMANY (FRA) (no. 916)
Arrives:
7:10am Wed, Jul 11 (12:10 a.m. EDT)
Duration:
7 hours and 52 minutes

From:
FRANKFURT, GERMANY (FRA)
Departs:
2:10pm Wed. July 11
To:
AMMAN, JORDAN (AMM) (no. 0126)
Arrives:
7:40pm (12:40 p.m. EDT)

Duration:
4 hours and 30 minutes

::insert night at the Four Seasons Amman--niiiiiiiice.::

From:
AMMAN, JORDAN (AMM)
Departs:
9:00am Thurs. July 12
To: BAGHDAD, IRAQ (BGW)
Arrives:
11:30am (3:30 a.m. EDT)
Duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes

People

I have a tendency to underestimate how much I depend on the people closest to me. In this case, I'm only now (T-minus 2 days) realizing how difficult it will be to live in a war zone--an already challenging situation--without the people who mean the world to me. Obviously I will miss my family, but that's nothing new for someone living 3,000 miles from most of her relatives. Over the last five years, I've developed an East Coast family made up of my closest friends, and this is the longest period of time I've been away from them too. I've never gone two months without seeing MHG or IVK in the last five years, and I'm not really looking forward to the idea of it. Even since I've moved down south, I've had a relatively easy 4-hour drive to see most of my closest friends, and after a bad week I've been able to sprint straight into OFH's arms.

And as much as I complain about the new city, there are at least a few people I'll miss here too. KH, MC and AK have kept me sane for a whole year, and I'm still counting on MMS to help do it for the next year. I never thought I'd hear myself saying I'll miss this city, but there it is. There's a William James quote that says "Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world," which sum up my feelings about my current locale exactly. By that logic, I suppose I can handle Baghdad too. I'll be putting uite a few minutes on that international cell phone, though.

Body armor

I picked up my body armor today. My organization has sent about 90 people to Iraq, each of them with their own vest at a cost of $1,600 each--evidently it is supremely important that each one be custom-fit. Mine is level III armor, which combines Kevlar, ceramic and steel plates so that it is resistant to military rifle bullets, handguns and sub-machine guns like AK-47s. The only thing it won't stop is armor-piercing bullets, which require a special set of plates. Mine looks very similar to this, with a removable groin protector and lots of velcro-attached pockets on the front. It has plates in the sides to prevent injury from shrapnel, a ceramic collar for the same purpose and a spiffy little "Press" tag that can come off if necessary.

It's also unbelievably heavy.

My vest's creator estimated it's a 25-30 pound vest; for a relatively slight woman, that's a huge percentage of my body weight. It took a surprising amount of strength just to lift it over my head, and by the time I hooked the Velcro around my stomach all I wanted to do was sit down. And this was in an air-conditioned office, a far cry from the 130 degrees of Baghdad in August. I know it's better than the alternative, but wearing this thing is going to be a major challenge.

Hotel journalism

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of what some have dubbed "hotel journalism," press critics' term for what they see as lazy reporting in Iraq and other places. Instead of going out and getting the story, the accusation goes, reporters sit in their improvised newsrooms letting Iraqi stringers do the real work while the Westerners take the credit. Most recently, one of my hazardous duty training instructors grilled me in our hotel bar about why American journalists are in Iraq at all. "They're not doing the first-hand reporting anyway," he said. "Wouldn't it be easier for all involved if they just compiled their Iraqi staff's feeds sitting in D.C. instead of in a walled compound in Baghdad?"

Perhaps not surprisingly, the criticism generally comes from overtly partisan people. Do you think the left-wing media is being too tough on Bush and his administration? It's probably because reporters aren't actually experiencing all the positive work going on. If you think major media outlets are the lapdogs of the neocons, blame it on the fact that they don't see all the real danger in Iraq. Experienced reporters hear it constantly from both sides. And as someone with more first-hand experience than any of those partisan bloggers, I know for a fact that they're wrong. There isn't a lazy American reporter in Iraq, nor one who has a political agenda. Contrary to popular belief, American reporters don't live in the Green Zone or receive protection from the military.

Yet the idea of hotel journalism still gnaws at me constantly. The reality of the situation in Iraq is that reporters often can't do their own reporting from the streets. It's not laziness, it's common sense; an American wandering through Sadr City, for example, would surely be killed. When reporters do go out, it's with bodyguards, translators and an armored vehicle. We all take risks to go to Iraq, but we must make sure they're calculated ones. Sometimes even a great story isn't worth it, and that's a difficult thing for a hard-nosed journalist to accept. This can be troubling: does the need to avoid so many areas mean the American press isn't getting the whole story?

Former UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Dean Orville Schell is emphatic in his argument that reporters are doing an admirable job under the circumstances. "But while Western journalists are relying on surrogates, what I observed at the bureaus I visited in Baghdad was far from a dereliction of duty," he wrote last year in the New York Review of Books. "If anything, it showed how the old overseas bureau model of independent reporters has been forced to evolve under very extreme pressure to survive."(Full article is pasted here; scroll down a bit to see the top)

I am constantly inspired by journalists who manage to capture stories of life in Iraq under the pressure Schell describes (one of my recent favorites is here). I know hating on the mainstream press is trendy on both sides of the aisle, but I think reasonable people must concede these guys are doing the best they can.

Oh, the details

I board a plane to Frankfurt (then Amman, then Baghdad) nine days from today. Yesterday I began to think that this does not give me enough time to take care of all the details that must be taken care of, or at least not by using the calm, thorough method I might prefer. For obvious reasons, going to Baghdad requires a whole slew of complicated arrangements. I still don't have an Iraqi entry visa or the letters from my employers asserting my right to be there. I don't have a prescription for Cipro or the updated shots I need, I haven't done my prescreening for PTSD, I haven't backed up my computer's contents on an external hard drive (which I need to buy) and I don't have appropriately modest clothing. I also am working three days this week, entertaining my mother, who is in town from Tuesday through Monday and trying to see everyone who wants to hang out one more time before I go. Oh, and my car desperately needs an oil change.

Yikes.